The Biometric Threat

As with so many other convenient technologies, the world is underestimating the risks associated with biometric identification systems. India has learned about those risks the hard way – and should serve as a cautionary tale to the governments and corporations seeking to expand the use of these technologies.

NEW DELHI – Around the world, governments are succumbing to the allure of biometric identification systems. To some extent, this may be inevitable, given the burden of demands and expectations placed on modern states. But no one should underestimate the risks these technologies pose.

Private companies, too, have embraced biometric identification systems. Smartphones use fingerprints and facial recognition to determine when to “unlock.” Rather than entering different passwords for different services – including financial services – users simply place their finger on a button on their phone or gaze into its camera lens.

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Jayati Ghosh is Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, Executive Secretary of International Development Economics Associates, and a member of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation.

It seems like a bad implementation. The machines should reject if a side camera detects the hand is not properly orientated. The biometric match should not be just fingerprints but fingerprints + face + iris.

As for the greater social implications, they are of course enormous, but just like Pandora could not close the box, we live henceforth in World where ANYBODY can easily and cheaply perform biometric recognition on you, with or without you knowing.

Risky or not, the attempt to regulate the superimposition of technology over human data and human identity is already a lost cause, although perhaps this is not immediately obvious to those outside tech. Attempts at regulation of human data have no chance of actually working, notwithstanding how many laws are passed. You can make a few high profile court cases of big corporations who flout digital regs you pass, but it is impossible to stop millions of individuals replicating and pushing out assets that can take a digital form (ie pretty much everything) for global consumption. A trivial example - it would take me precisely 30 seconds to locate a pdf of a book I don't want to pay for and download it. Loss of control over privacy and personal identity to algorithmic tech is frightening, sure, but the entire notion of human privacy is and always has been a mirage, which persisted because of the slowness with which data spreads sans technology. But the proliferation of all human data, through osmosis, is not really preventable. The only difference now, is that algorithms and biotech will automate the process, accelerate and magnify the spread, to an extent that will grind all existing ideas of human sensibility into dust in a few decades. But all that has happened is that you have been stripped of a few more illusions.

Because the point being missed, is how futile the fast emerging bio-edit technologies like Crispr and Prime, render the entire online privacy and identity debate. Because everyone's genome, the most fundamental aspect of the data of any individual, is not protectable. It's not encrypted or inaccessible, in fact it's totally exposed - you shed skin and hair every day, and each bit of that carries *you* around a million times over. And soon enough, once others have the means to process this data, they will have ability to predict your behaviour with better accuracy than you yourself (unless you ask the algorithms to reflect back to you what you really are, which then creates altering feedback loops), and then nudge your behaviour. As can you do to others, of course. A splicing/decoding/identity-spoofing arms-race. And that's just the start of course.

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